Israel To Challenge War Crime Findings In U.n. Report On Gaza

TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli military is completing a rebuttal to a U.N. report accusing it of serious violations of international and humanitarian law in its invasion of the Gaza Strip a year ago.

Its central aim is to dispel the report's harsh conclusion - that the death of noncombatants and destruction of civilian infrastructure were part of an official plan to terrorize the Palestinian population.

The U.N. report, by a committee led by Richard Goldstone, an esteemed South African judge, was published in late September and called on Israel to carry out an independent investigation of its conduct in the three-week war.

Israel, which had refused to cooperate with the investigation, at first dismissed the report as unworthy of attention. But the government quickly found that the world took it quite seriously and found itself accused of premeditated war crimes. It now considers fighting that charge a priority.

The rebuttal will be given to U.N. officials in the coming weeks and its contents will remain under wraps until then. But officers involved in writing the report gave some details.

One concerned the destruction of Gaza's sole flour mill. The Goldstone report asserts that the Bader flour mill "was hit by an airstrike, possibly by an F-16."

The Israeli investigators say they have photographic proof that this is false, that the mill was accidentally hit by artillery in the course of a firefight with Hamas militiamen.

The dispute is significant because the U.N. report asserts that "the destruction of the mill was carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population," an explicit war crime.

The case, along with the destruction of chicken coops, water wells, a cement plant and about 4,000 homes, are crucial building blocks in the Goldstone case that Israel set out to eliminate infrastructure so as to cause intense civilian suffering.

Maj. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, the Israeli military advocate general, said that those assertions went beyond anything of which others had accused Israel.

Others contend there must be an independent, nonmilitary investigation.

"Israel owes it to its own citizens and soldiers, as well as to the victims, to carry out an independent investigation," said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University and a co-author of the military's code of ethics.